Friday, March 30, 2012

So, the new solar powered e-bike station is out on Ag Campus. This station is powered by ~1kW of solar arrays, run through an Outback Flexpower inverter and then to the batteries. An important part is that this station is off-grid so all of the operations and battery charging is done from solar! We pushed hard for about two weeks to get this finished, with most of station fabrication done at the Civil Engineering machine/fabrication shop and most of the electronics design and development done at the Biosystems Engineering Sensors and Controls Lab. We had a hardware/software problem when we hooked it all up that we're remedying now. We are up and should be running soon. Special thanks to students (Casey Langford, Taekwan Yoon, Ryan Overton, Levon Brassfield, Zane Pannell, and Kenric McKay) and staff (Stacy Worley, David Smith, Larry Roberts, and Ken Thomas) for the hard work, particularly near the end. We look forward to getting these bikes rolling soon. For now, check out the pictures of the fabrication at: http://bit.ly/H7HnxB